


An Impossible Proposition

by Critter_Cantrip



Series: Dancing with Fire [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Bad BDSM Etiquette, F/M, M/M, Season/Series 02, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-31 14:15:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13976844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Critter_Cantrip/pseuds/Critter_Cantrip
Summary: To save a possessed woman's life Caleb must confront a much more personal demon.





	1. Denial

Caleb backed away from Fjord in a moment of blind panic.

“You’re crazy.” He took two more steps before his back hit the wall of the small room.  “This is insane.”

No one else moved. No one else spoke.  Fjord leaned against the door, the only exit. Molly leaned back in a chair, his large frame against a window too narrow for even Nott to slip through.  

Caleb felt his hands tighten against the book in his hands. Once he realized what he was doing he threw it away as if it were a burning coal.  He felt dizzy. Light headed.  They couldn’t ask this of him. They wouldn’t.

No.

Had the word managed to scrape out of him?

“We can understand your reluctance in this matter,” Fjord said, his soft drawl supportive. For the moment.

He rested his hands in his belt as he leaned against the door to their shared room in the inn. “However none of the parties involved are terribly thrilled with their lot in this.  And you’re the only one who can set things right.”

“Come now,” Molly threw out as he balanced a coin across the back of his hand. “It’s not every day you get asked to shag a woman back into sanity.”

Fjord sighed heavily at the intrusion. “Might it not be clear that Caleb isn’t exactly the…ah… ideal candidate for the task at hand? Might it not be pertinent to keep that forked tongue of yours civil for two drinks off a mermaid’s tits?”

Molly visibly brightened at this last exchange. “Oh,” he said with a lean forward, “that’s a new one, I’m quite fond of that.”

Caleb glanced between his two travel companions, feeling his eyes wide in his face as he tried to compose some sort of a reasoned response.

“Whatever is wrong with her, I am not sleeping with an incapacitated woman. I’m not. Doing. This. Ritual.” Caleb spit on the book where it lay discarded on the floor.

“Well, that’s that then,” Molly said, lowering his chair with a solid thumb. Caleb jumped where he stood, his hand reflexively clenched around his diamond focus in his pocket at the sudden noise.

“What do you mean?” Caleb said. He followed Molly’s motions as the man stood and draped his coat over his arm with dashing aplomb.

Fjord looked equally confused. “Molly, we can’t leave the poor girl in this state--” he began before Molly interrupted him.

“Oh well, of course not. She’ll be dragged to the local priest, priestess, someone of some religious import, deemed possessed by a demon, which she is, of course, and they’ll hang her, or drown her, or do whatever arcane ritual these backwater folk figure will save her immortal soul at the sacrifice of her physical body. And she’ll be no further concern of ours.”

The motion of Fjord from the door was smooth and fluid and ended with Fjord pressing his blade, slick with salt water, against Molly’s throat. A feral growl cut through Fjord’s words. “Hold your gods’ forsaken snark Mollymauk or I will help you quiet that quick wit of yours.”

Caleb saw a bead of sweat break out on Molly’s brow as the tiefling contemplated the rage in Fjord’s eyes.  He also saw the door swing open without Fjord’s weight against it.

With the years of practice being the thin, lanky child in his favor he slipped out the door before Fjord could fully turn to prevent his escape. His scarf yanked at his neck for a brief moment before, in an act of unusual charity, the gods saw fit for it to slide off and into Fjord’s hands.

He was gone, then. The others called out after him but he took the stairs at a frightening pace, letting his feet land every third step at most, sliding off the ones he dared touch.

The lower level of the inn was a blur of singing, music, loud conversation and nauseating smells of cheap beer and cheaper food. He thought he saw Nott sitting with Jester before he slammed through the main door and out into the warm dusk air.

Why had they come to this forsaken patch of civilization? He dodged to the right into an alley and cast an illusion on himself. He collapsed to the ground and stooped low to better the odds that this would work.

Fjord and Molly ran past him, barely casting a glance for the beggar that held out a pitiful bowl as they passed. It was critical that he not move, not break the illusion with any added height. Legs strained to kneel as he pressed himself into the darkness of the alley and muttered a few additional words of suggestion laced with power. “This is not what you are looking for. Seek onward. Further.”

They moved beyond.  He held the pose, the bowl lowered in front of him as if waiting for the next likely target for begging. Still he waited. Forty breaths. One hundred. Two hundred. Finally, he let the illusion drop as he limped further into the alley.  He rubbed his legs as he thought. Too close to the inn. He needed to get more distance to be safe.  But where would he go?

And Nott.  He couldn’t abandon her.  Even if it meant confronting demons he had to find a way to retrieve Nott, at the least.

“That was quite good, Caleb,” a scratchy voice said from the deepest dark of the roof above.

He yelped. It wasn’t dignified or heroic. He didn’t care. She had startled half a year out of him. He clutched his chest reflexively as his heart pounded.

“Nott, how long have you— when— how— “

A small figure swung down from the roof using a bit of thatched edge for leverage before bounding off the side of the opposite building and landing next to Caleb’s feet. Nott glanced up at Caleb with a toothy smile before adjusting her mask.

“That’s a new one. Even for me. Took a minute to suss you out. Nobody else smells like Caleb, though.” A delicate snort accompanied this statement as Nott took his hand in hers and began to walk out of the alley.

“What? Wait, no.” Caleb said with a strident tone. He yanked on her with unintended roughness and let go when Nott yelped.

“Caleb!” Nott hissed and held her sore arm to her side. “That hurt!”

Caleb threw his hands in front of him, tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry. Gods, Nott. I’m sorry. I hurt everything I love. Even you.”           

Caleb turned away from Nott and covered his head, rocking back and forth for a few moments. He’d lose everything this time. The safety of the group, the respect of his companions, Nott’s misguided affection. How many times would he have to pay for his nature? When would it end?

“Hello? Traveler?”

Caleb let out a low moan and let himself fall to his knees, still clutching his hands over his head, fingers tangled in his hair. It had gotten worse. Somehow this evening had gotten worse.

 Jester stepped into the alley, her hood flipped back to reveal the impractical tiny bells on silver strands that the tiefling had woven around her horns. For luck, she had said.

Nott ran up to Jester and tugged at her belt, trying to drag Jester forward. “Something’s wrong with Caleb.”

Jester let a hand rest casually on Nott’s head for a moment, a gentle tousle of the goblin’s hair, before allowing herself to be dragged forward. “Well, there’s always something wrong with Caleb, you’ll have to be more precise.”

“That nasty book broke him, I think,” Nott said.

Jester looked unusually solemn for a moment as Caleb dared a quick glance at her face. “I understand now, Traveler. Thank you,” she said to no one in particular.  With a strange grace she knelt next to Caleb, bells tinkling, as Nott continued to cling to her belt. “So, the men botched the matter?” she asked in a conversational tone. As if they were discussing inopportune rain.

Caleb let out a small sound, something between a sob and a laugh. He let his hands drop to the earth at his side, running his fingers through the muck of the alley over and over. Filth. He was filth. The least he could do was look the part so that others wouldn’t mistake him for someone trustworthy. Something decent.

Jester watched him dig his fingers into the mud for a few moments before she delicately scraped a finger next to his.

He stopped and looked up at her. Watched confused as she scraped the filth across his cheek and then across her own.

“Do you know what my mother taught me, Caleb?” Jester said as she took his chin in her hand.         

Caleb shook his head, not trusting his voice. He did manage a glance at Nott before meeting Jester’s eyes again. A silent plea for some modicum of propriety.

Jester favored him with a particular tilt of her head and a warm curl of her lips before she spoke. “She taught me to understand the way men think. The way men feel.  She taught me to consider what they want.”

The fingers grasping his chin tightened and gave his face a little shake. “She also taught me to consider what they actually want instead of what they say they want.” Jester released his chin and picked up his hands from the mud. She turned them over to look at his palms, his fingers, the dirt driven deep under the nails.

“You are an interesting man, Caleb,” she said slowly. “You want the world to see you for all that you are not.”

Caleb wasn’t sure if it was the stress of the confrontation or the lingering effect of the spell he had conducted to comprehend the strange language in the book but he swore that there was a glow. It settled on Jester like a delicate veil. When she turned her head to glance back into Caleb’s eyes the bits of silver that glinted around her horns formed the suggestion of a halo.

“I’m a monster.”  It felt driven out of him, as if he couldn’t breathe except to say those words.

“Fascinating,” Jester said as she stroked one of his filthy hands, spreading the muck over her delicate blue skin. He tried to pull his hand away from her, to stop the contamination. Instead she pulled his hand against her breast, holding it firm to her heart. She was far too strong for him to prevent it.

“Tell me Nott, why was Caleb in that quaint little lock up with you?” Jester didn’t glance away from Caleb. Didn’t give Caleb a way to escape her gaze or her grasp.

The shame poured over him like molten lead, eating at his insides, scorching his humanity. Memory stole him away from the present and he saw the fire rise in his mind’s eye.

“It’s not my place to say,” Nott replied with an awkward shift and a sniffle.

A sudden weight clung to his side and without a thought he lifted his other hand and wrapped his arm around the form of Nott. Only now could he tear his gaze away from the shimmering Jester and lay his head gently on the goblin. He gratefully closed his eyes and breathed in the simple scent of her, something like moss and lakes and copper. The memory of smoke and flame retreated.

“Ah,” Jester said, releasing his hand, letting him enclose Nott in a fragile hug.

Caleb wasn’t sure how long he stayed like that, clinging to the last person in the world that offered him something close to solace. A few scraping breathes, maybe three.

“Caleb?” Nott said, her voice muffled by the mask and being smushed into his tattered cloak. He pulled away from her and took the arm he had pulled into his hands. Examined it with tender care.

“Caleb?” she repeated after he had assured himself that no permanent damage had been done.

“Caleb, you have to tell someone.” Nott looked up into his face with hopeful eyes that shattered him in a hundred different ways. “Promise, Caleb?”

 


	2. Anger

He couldn’t stand to be in the inn they had rented. Instead they ended up in the mostly empty stables. A small bit of magic ensured no pests would join their company as he leaned against a mound of hay. He and Yasha shared the stables with an old mule in the farthest pen that nodded now and again in its sleep.

Caleb worried the dried flakes of mud from his hands, wringing them silently as he stared into the darkness of the rafters above. Yasha sat on an overturned bucket cleaning a blade, seemingly unaware of his strange state of mind.

They had found them, Jester, Caleb and Nott, in the alley. Fjord and Molly seemed befuddled by the state of Jester’s clothing, half covered in mud. Caleb was sure he looked a sight as well, the muck flicked on his chin and coating his hands and trousers. Still, Jester had smoothed things over, somehow arranging that Yasha, not Fjord or Mollymauk, keep an eye on him while Jester took Nott to clean up.

It must be Beauregard’s turn to watch the prisoner. That poor woman. He shuddered and rested his face in his hands. The words from earlier echoed in his perfect memory. Monster.

“So. I’ve missed a few things,” Yasha said in between scrapes of her honing blade.

How to reply. Should he?

“I’m not a priest, Caleb. You want to say something, say it. I can’t absolve you so I won’t attempt to judge you. You want to lie to Nott and say you’ve said your peace, you can do that too.”

The scrape along the blade continued unabated between her words, a sharp undertone.

“Do you believe in karma?” Caleb said.

“Some divine scales of our rights and wrongs? I’ve heard the theory,” she said. The scraping stopped. He heard her shift as she placed the sword in a scabbard.

“Yes, well, do you believe in it?”

A rustle in the hay as she settled down near him. Not next to him. Not touching. Close enough he might be able to reach out and touch her if he chose.

She sighed. A time passed. “Folks want things to matter. The gods to determine our fates so that we are not doomed by our actions. The gods to _not_ determine our fates so that our actions matter. Our good deeds to be noticed, our bad deeds forgiven. Karma just seems another way to settle the world into something palatable.”

“It exists.” Caleb said with simple sincerity, as if to say that water is wet or the sun is warm.

“I see.” Yasha said. A shift, perhaps she turned in the hay to look at him. He let his hands go loose above his head but kept his eyes towards the rafters.

“I’ve done things. Wanted things. Tried to obtain the things I desired. Tried to do it in a way that wouldn’t hurt people.” The words teared at him, ripped him insides as they escaped his lips. Rending hot claws made of coal and devouring flesh into ash.

It wasn’t enough. He didn’t know how to say the whole of it. He waited for her to ask a question. To offer sympathy. Advice. There was only the weight of the silence and the promise he had to keep.

“I’m a monster.” There. He’d said the truth of it. Now only to explain. “I brokered a deal with a whore to satisfy my urges, and they were vulgar and strange. I paid her good coin to keep quiet about it. I compensated her for the.” He paused, his voice cracking.

A strangled whisper finally escaped. “She was hurt a bit, you see. There’s something so terribly wrong with me. I enjoyed it. But it wasn’t right. I knew it wasn’t right.”

“I started to look into how to fix it. I thought, there was a curse, a darkness I could lift and I could be n-normal.” His voice quavered and he wasn’t sure a flea could hear him now, let alone Yasha, lounging so far away. Then he remembered he’d chased all the fleas away and let out a fey croak of a laugh.

“The- the woman I’d made arrangements with. She went to the church after. I suppose my coin wasn’t sufficient to buy her silence.” The betrayal struck him through anew, painful and raw. “I swear, she’d consented to all of it. I. Swear. It didn’t matter. A contract in ink didn’t matter.  They dragged me away in chains.”

Pulled out of his bed, barely decent, chained while a priest chanted and incense drifted from a waving thurible that left him weak and mute. Dragged through the mud, half the town agape as the scribe’s son was drawn across the rough stone of the road towards the church.

Unable to focus the first gasps of his nascent magic, unable to prevent his body from being battered as they heaved him into a dark underground room in the church, retching his supper from the noxious smoke, he had only one thought.

He deserved this. This was his fate. His perversion had led to this moment. His actions and decisions alone had cast him from a prosperous position in the town to this hell.

“I was – they called it a cleansing.  A trial by fire, to determine if the demons within me could be driven out.”

They were there. To witness.  His father, the priest, some other members of the church, even the woman who had accused him, somehow forgiven the lesser charge of her debauchery for having come forward. He remembered their faces with perfect clarity.

“I was supposed to burn.  I thought at first I wanted it. To die. To at least be cleansed. But when the smoke began to choke me – I – I was a coward. I didn’t want to die. Not even if it meant being saved in the thereafter.”

He cried. Violent sobs shook him and he wrapped his arms around his slender shoulders and turned his face away from Yasha.

He couldn’t say the rest. Couldn’t face what he’d done. What he’d become. He turned inward, trying to chase away the feeling of the flames licking at his flesh, the pain of the smoke in his throat.

The smell filled his nose, so familiar, the scent of the acrid air filled with soot. He was burning alive, burning, consuming the flame into himself, learning it’s language in a flash of insight. Releasing that knowledge in a terrifying roar that –

“Caleb!” Yasha slapped him, hard. Again. And again. He shook his head, bemused, and felt the flames lick against his skin, dance off his hair in tiny ringlets of blue and gold. In a panic he came back to himself.

I’m in the stable. Oh gods.

I’m in the stable.

For a moment the flames fed from his fear and flared a foot from his head.

He knew with certainty there were two outcomes. The flames could rise and consume this building whole in moments, leaving him untouched, or he could control this and pay the price.

Yasha ignored the flames and grabbed his hand. “Caleb. This is yours. Command it.” 

The flames waivered, dimmed, rushed up and dimmed again, leaving the hay smoldering but the support beams of the stable untouched. The mule let out a terrified whinny. Panicked kicks followed as it tried to escape the fire.

Yasha placed Caleb’s hand on her throat. His eyes widened in shock as the demon within roared its approval.

“Command me. If you can.”

The flames died instantly. He flicked a bit of quartz dust in the direction of the mule and muttered a few words in his native tongue. The creature calmed. Then he turned his attention to Yasha.

Her throat was large in his hand, yet still he marveled at the feeling of grasping it. Controlling it. Shaking it ever so slightly side to side, letting her head loll.

He felt the stranger walk within him. The confident man who knew exactly what he wanted from the world. The monster who defiled what he touched. How it pleased him to feel her hair brush against his skin as he tightened his grip.

“I killed them,” he said in a plain tone. “They burned as I was to have burned.” He shook her again, eyes keen on her, looking for the telltale signs.

“I didn’t mean to. None the less, they burned. Burned because I am a monster. I consume all that is good and holy and I spread perversity.”

Did she have the demon in her too? The fire? He couldn’t quite tell. That just wouldn’t do. He had devoted himself to not spreading the evil within. He could at least die without doing that again.

Caleb stroked a stingingly hot hand against Yasha’s face, tracing the curve of her chin before brushing a finger against her lips. 

“So, I wandered.” He licked the side of her face to see what she would do. She tasted of the hay and the smoldering embers he had created. He wanted more. So much more.

“A scribe isn’t exactly a grand skill for being on the road alone. I barely knew how to control the fire in me. I managed to reclaim a few of my things before I left. It was enough to continue some of my studies here and there. In the end, they thought I tried to pick the wrong pocket.”

He laughed then. A deep, painful sound that ended in a tattered smile. “They were going to kill her. Nott. What is it with priests and fire in this country?  Couldn’t have that.  Couldn’t break in the way I’d planned, either. She was—” He stopped, the stranger feeling disoriented at the mention of Nott.

Nott, who, for some reason, made him think outside of himself, his demon, his rage and failure and pain.

He felt a disjointed internal snap and released Yasha, stared at his hands before he fell to the ground in a sobbing heap.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boiler plate statement: I'm a fan of Safe, Sane and negotiated Consent in the real world. Thankfully in fiction we can omit the messy, slow details in favor of the dramatic, the hot, or the intense; knowing that what's hot in our heads doesn't always translate well into reality.


	3. Bargaining

He awoke from a strange fantasy involving improbable and profane acts with Yasha, of all people, which only capped the most bizarre fever dream of his life. With a start he realized he was not alone.  Three things were readily apparent.

One was the thin silver wire that was tied to his hand and led … somewhere. The second was the figure that slept on the floor next to his bed. The third was that, for the first time since he had met this strange troupe, he was clean. As if someone had taken a bristle brush to his entire body.

He rubbed at painful, gritty eyes and accidently yanked the wire. The figure on the floor shifted, rolled, and a fully naked Mollymauk lazily tilted his head up to gaze at Caleb from his make shift mound of cloaks and blankets.

Caleb gaped.  It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen Molly naked before, but this wasn’t the same as seeing another man take care of business in the woods or wash at a stream. Silver wire gleamed over his body, tied over muscles and layered across his throat. Care had been given to his extensive artwork, with the wires weaving around and through his tattoos to complement, rather than compete, with his embellishments.

“Well, look who’s finally awake,” Molly said as he stretched languidly. “I don’t mind sleeping in but really – you take it to new extremes.”

“What is this?” Caleb managed to say with an awkward squeak. He clutched at his bedding, realizing he was both naked and that this brought Molly half up onto the bed with him due to the tether that led from Caleb’s wrist.

“Well,” Molly said from his perch at the foot of the bed where he rested his arms, his legs splayed behind him, “It seems you’ve got yourself an itch in need of scratching.”

Bits and pieces of the dream flashed through his mind, trying to coalesce into a coherent message. The book, the woman, the alley, the barn. Too clear.  Dreams were not like his living memories, not so easy to bring back into the focus of his mind’s eye. These thoughts, these recollections then were-

A hand touched his cheek, feather soft, and he started half out of the bed. Dragging Molly _into_ the bed. The tielfing didn’t have the decency to look upset at the circumstance.

Decency? What was left of Caleb that was decent?

“Here now,” Molly said in a stern tone, “we’ve had enough of that business.”

Caleb threw the bed sheets, already a disheveled tangle, over Molly and reached for his trousers on the chair nearby.  The tielfing let out an “oof” as he fell towards Caleb and half out of the bed.

This was simply too much. Caleb reached out to break the wire and stopped as his other hand touched it. Thrumming power, a kind he’d never felt in his life, surged through the tenuous silver.  He removed his left hand and the feeling disappeared.

He sat down on the edge of the bed with a thump that shifted the bed posts against the floor. He was under a binding. A very complicated one, and given the power he’d just felt he didn’t want to chance breaking it without further knowledge. Letting his left hand drift just above the wire he his invoked mage sight.

Drops of sunlight on mountain dew. Moonlight cascading down waterfalls to patter into puddles. Stars that pin wheeled in the endless heavens. Celestial.

A glance at his wrist and back to Mollymauk who tossed the blankets to the floor confirmed it. This binding would last until events unfolded in the heavens. He knew it was midafternoon, and he knew there were a few hours until sunset. The binding was complex enough that it would take longer to safely unravel than the time for it to fade on its own.

Caleb swallowed against the lump in his throat.

“Figured it out, have you?” Molly asked. Then he yanked on the cord like a leash.

It was a deliberate move, a provocation. An invitation. Caleb felt the stranger stir in him, saw the possibilities.

“Abbrechen,” Caleb said, slipping into Zemnian as he turned away from Molly. He burned. He defiled. He wouldn’t do this.

“Ah, Caleb. You stubborn ass. If you’d wanted – needed – to own someone for a time, you had only to ask.”

The hand rested on his shoulder, stroked down his side and wrapped around one of his hips. With a smooth motion Molly swung his body alongside Caleb. He rested his head on Caleb’s shoulder. A single curl of his horn dug slightly into Caleb’s cheek.

He couldn’t move away. Not because of the binding. His breath hitched in his lungs, came out in small, frustrated gasps. Caleb flexed his fingers. He dug them into the bedding, wished it were mud, wished it were filth.

Molly licked Caleb’s ear with a delicate flick and Caleb turned away. This wasn’t what he wanted. To be seduced by Molly. This infantile foreplay. Caleb turned and grasped the tether, yanking it as he rose from the bed.

Molly tumbled to the floor. Whatever other properties the binding was imbued with it seemed to have leveled the playing field physically between the two of them.

Better. Both his natures agreed on that. Still Caleb struggled with the cinders of his soul.

He wrapped the cord once around Molly’s throat as Molly looked up at Caleb, now on all fours as he regained his balance.

“You are mine?” It was part a question, part a declaration.

“Yes,” Molly said.

“Why?” Caleb’s voice cracked as he pulled on the tether, took a half step towards Molly.

Molly muttered something in infernal before switching to the common tongue. “I’m weird, Caleb. I’m perverse. I’m a demon born who wants things done to him that aren’t kind, aren’t proper, and guarantee I burn in damnation in half a dozen religions.”

“Name three.”

Mollymauk tilted his head at Caleb.  A bit of light from the window glinted off a horn piercing. Considering. Weighing.

“Choke me. Brand me. Use me.”

Caleb came undone. The stranger within him danced with his soul, charred it to the wick, left nothing good and pure.  And he didn’t care.

He burned. Mollymauk burned with him.

* * *

 

Dusk waned past twilight and released the two men from the binding. The silver thread fell from Caleb’s wrist and disintegrated, as if made of sunlight itself.

Caleb half drowsed in the bed. Molly slept curled at his feet. At some point they had reclaimed the bedding. A simple glyph of flame was visible, etched into a bare spot on Molly’s back, the lines clean and dark against his violet skin.

He felt himself for the first time since the church. Able to think clearly. Able to reason with his past to some extent. The flames licked inside him as he reached out a hand to caress Mollymauk’s side. Hungry, yes, but not desperate. Not alone.

Molly’s eyes fluttered open and he stretched, his tail whipping above his hair as he climbed up the bed to rest his head on Caleb’s pillow.

“I was half afraid you’d run as soon as the binding broke,” Caleb said. A single hand traced Molly’s jaw.

“Ah, now, it takes more than a good tumble to chase me away,” Molly said in reply.

A firm hand grasped Caleb intimately but Caleb swatted it away. “Talk first.”

Molly’s flashed a long suffering moue before he settled on his elbow. It afforded a clear view of the violent bruises on his neck.

“Are you well?” Caleb asked. A tentative finger traced his handiwork.

Molly arched an elegant eyebrow at him. “I’ve been fucked over three ways to Da'leysen, my voice is hoarse for a variety of reasons, and I do believe I have a mark – your mark – on my left shoulder.  How’d you do that anyways? No matter – yes – I am especially ‘well.’”

“You’re such a talker,” Caleb said. “It’s a wonder you can shut up long enough to do what you do best.”

“And what’s that?” Molly laid a series of kisses on Caleb’s temple that trailed down to the well of his throat.

Caleb leaned back as the kisses wandered down his side, past a trail of fine burn scars and lingered at his hip. He grumbled under his breath in Zemnian when he felt a nip of sharp eye teeth on his inner thigh.

“I think,” Caleb said in heavily accented common, his breath rough, “you have a damned good idea.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boiler plate statement: I'm a fan of Safe, Sane and negotiated Consent in the real world. Thankfully in fiction we can omit the messy, slow details in favor of the dramatic, the hot, or the intense; knowing that what's hot in our heads doesn't always translate well into reality.


	4. Acceptance

The ritual for the half orc woman was beyond unpleasant.  There was a great deal of precision required of Caleb to conduct it and his stomach churned to think of it after.  Molly helped.

Molly ensured her gag was tight to prevent the possessed half orc from speaking the arcane words she had read and spreading her madness. Molly tied the ropes of brilliant crimson that had to be bound across her dull green skin and his own. Molly lit the incense that reminded him far too much of the church forever in his memory.

Caleb found some way to twist his inner demon to the task at hand without running a knife over his wrists directly after. The book burst into flames as he thrust inside her, released himself, her demon, his rage with a feral shout of words in a language long dead.

Molly cut the ropes that bound them. Molly pulled him from the woman who began to scream, terrified and confused, no longer possessed. Molly hid his face from it all, sparing him at least the sight of the carnage he had wrought from being permanently seared into his mind’s eye.

Sweet, kind, ever happy Jester placed the mark of the Traveler, the Trickster, on the woman’s head and blurred her mind of the last few days. If she had not been able to offer this Caleb was not entirely sure that he wouldn’t have found a sharp blade after all.

He wept into Molly’s shoulder, wrapped in a blanket outside the farm house while Jester tended the woman within. The cold night air was barely warmed by the roaring fire that danced a foot from their forms.

“Sometimes,” Molly said as a hand stroked Caleb’s hair, “the world has a need of monsters. Sometimes there are evils that can only be met by them. And sometimes there are those who see past fangs and horns to what lays beneath.”

Jester joined them by the fire. “I gave her a sleeping potion. We’ll take her into town, burn the place like you said, to cleanse it. No one will ever know she was possessed.”

She touched Caleb on the shoulder, a gentle brush. He turned and saw the symbol of the Traveler in her other hand. Caleb fancied he saw that glow again before he blinked away his tears.

“Thank you,” he said with a small shake of his head, “but no.” He rested his head against Molly.  “I can live with the monster I am.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boiler plate statement: I'm a fan of Safe, Sane and negotiated Consent in the real world. Thankfully in fiction we can omit the messy, slow details in favor of the dramatic, the hot, or the intense; knowing that what's hot in our heads doesn't always translate well into reality.

**Author's Note:**

> Boiler plate statement: I'm a fan of Safe, Sane and negotiated Consent in the real world. Thankfully in fiction we can omit the messy, slow details in favor of the dramatic, the hot, or the intense; knowing that what's hot in our heads doesn't always translate well into reality.


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